Tag Archives: microsoft

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Heartbleed Leads Experts to Recommend #Password Changes

Security experts are urging consumers to change their Web passwords after the recent disclosure of a vulnerability touching wide swaths of the Internet, even as Google Inc. , Facebook Inc. and large banks said they weren’t affected.

The flaw to OpenSSL, an open-source software that runs on as many as two-thirds of all active websites, was reported on April 7, by researchers who pushed out a fix.

Dubbed Heartbleed, the bug could have allowed hackers to access encrypted e-mail messages, banking information, user names and passwords.

The flaw involving a two-year-old programming mistake was discovered by researchers from Google and Codenomicon, a security firm based in Finland, and reported to OpenSSL, according to a blog post from Codenomicon.

Google and Facebook said they addressed the problem before it was made public and saw no signs of vulnerabilities, while Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) made the requisite fixes.

Yahoo’s Patch

“A vulnerability, called Heartbleed, was recently identified impacting many platforms that use OpenSSL, including ours,” Yahoo said in an e-mailed statement.

Before Yahoo issued its fix, security researcher Mark Loman from the Netherlands demonstrated Tuesday on Twitter that he was able to force the site to leak usernames and passwords.

“It wasn’t Yahoo’s fault, yet they’re very slow at installing the critical fix,” Loman wrote on his Twitter Inc. (TWTR) account. “Bug disclosure was flawed too.”

Extra Protection

Many large consumer sites running OpenSSL aren’t vulnerable to being exploited because they use specialized encryption equipment and software.

“The security of our users’ information is a top priority,” Google said in a statement yesterday.

In a statement, Facebook said it “added protections for Facebook’s implementations of OpenSSL before this issue was publicly disclosed, and we haven’t detected any signs of suspicious activity on people’s accounts.”

Tests on the home pages of other large technology, e-commerce and banking companies including Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and Bank of America Corp. indicated they weren’t vulnerable.

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A Different Gates Is Returning to Microsoft

The last time Bill Gates played an active role at Microsoft, as chief software architect, he witnessed the company muffing its earliest efforts to become a major player in search, smartphones and tablet computers.

In the six years since then, he has watched as the technology industry changed without him. The personal computer era that Microsoft so ably dominated during and after Mr. Gates’s heyday as Microsoft’s chief executive has started to fade away. Now, the focus is on social media and mobile devices that run in large part on cloud computing.

And what technologies has Mr. Gates, who turned to philanthropy, been most vocal about during all that change? Things like self-contained toilets and vaccines.

 “I am a little obsessed with fertilizer,” reads the first sentence of a column he wrote for a recent issue of Wired, the technology magazine.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/

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Microsoft Prescription: More Bill Gates as mentor

Satya Nadella is Microsoft Corp.’s new CEO. But he ascends as co-founder Bill Gates returns to a more central role at a company struggling to catch up in mobile and other fast-moving technologies.

Mr. Gates is giving up the chairman’s role to become technical adviser to Mr. Nadella, the 22-year Microsoft veteran who was named Tuesday to succeed Steve Ballmer as its third chief executive. Mr. Gates said he would devote up to a third of his time—which is now largely devoted to philanthropic activities—to help Mr. Nadella craft Microsoft’s product strategy.

WSJ

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